Independent bookstores in the western U.S. came through the holidays with boosted balance sheets and tales of community connection.

In the mountain town of Winthrop, Wash., Christmas came early when a wayward Rebecca Yarros shipment appeared at Trail’s End Bookstore. Around the time that Yarros’s Iron Flame hit shelves, store manager Abilene Hagee said, “Macmillan was switching us to a different account number, and somehow we ended up with 112 copies of the special edition of Fourth Wing. They showed up, and I almost cried, because we’re more a touristy-based store” in the North Cascades and not a high-traffic urban shop.

Hagee and Trail’s End social media manager Paola Merrill, a former employee at Village Books in Bellingham with a cottagecore following, posted a video of their overstocked storefront. It went viral. “We sold everything within two days,” Hagee said. “We shipped all over the world—to Australia, to France, everybody wanted it.” Once they sold out, they directed customers to Pacific Northwest indies including Beach Books of Seaside, Ore., and A Book for All Seasons in Leavenworth, Wash. (until those stores, too, cried uncle from too many requests and too few copies). “It saved our November” and was a promising lead-in to snow season in Hagee’s ski town.

Paul Bradley Carr, who with his wife Sarah Lacy founded the Best Bookstore in Palm Springs in late 2022, reported their “first fully profitable quarter. Total sales for December were up 32% compared to last year. Pure in-store (over the counter, not counting online) sales were up about 14% from last year. Palm Springs was hopping!”

A Best Bookstore in Palm Springs in-store event with authors Steven Rowley and Byron Lane moved copies of Rowley’s The Celebrants and Lane’s Big Gay Wedding, and other top sellers were the store’s favorite handsells, which include the growth-mindset motivator Hidden Potential by Adam Grant and psychological thriller Strange Sally Diamond by Liz Nugent. Carr was surprised “that nobody predicted how well Liz Cheney and Cassidy Hutchinson would do” with their books Oath and Honor and Enough, and he saw a “sub-trend” that “political books written by women (Heather Cox Richardson, Rachel Maddow) far outsold political books by men.”

At Eagle Harbor Book Co. on Bainbridge Island, Wash., book buyer Jane Danielson said Oath and Honor "was a last-minute favorite. It was hard to keep in stock, and everyone wanted it." Eagle Harbor's "sales were up 10% in retail dollars, and 9% in units sold," Danielson added. "We like to look at units, since the dollar value has inflation built in, and so may not be a real increase."

Danielson saw "fewer early shoppers and many more last-minute shoppers this year," suggesting procrastination is again becoming customary after several pandemic years of pre-planning. Other big books for Eagle Harbor included How to Know a Person by David Brooks, The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, and On Island Time, a regional favorite of travel artistry by the late and much-missed Tacoma illustrator Chandler O'Leary.

Bookshop Santa Cruz likewise saw robust sales of Maddow’s Prequel, said manager Casey Coonerty Protti, along with local author Nina Simon’s cozy murder mystery Mother–Daughter Murder Night and Daniel Mason’s haunting, multigenerational North Woods. “It seemed like customers were in the mood to be entertained,” said Coonerty Protti, who was amazed to sell more than 150 copies of the Taylor Swift Little Golden Book. “Hardback fiction did especially well, followed by nonfiction that was in a storytelling format,” notably The Art Thief by Michael Finkel. “We ended up for December and felt like the store was packed with more families and out of town visitors that reminded us of pre-COVID years.”

Bookshop Santa Cruz encouraged community-mindedness with a Winter Reading Program (“we challenge customers to read three of eight selected books across genres to win prizes”), an early-season online flash sale, and a holiday book drive that raised upward of $11,000 for local school libraries. For young readers and a adorable regional touch, the bookshop put together an “otter box” package “of board books about Santa Cruz's otters and an otter plushie plus a note written from our beloved Rocking Horse.”

Handselling Children’s Backlist and New Releases

At Mr. Mopps’ Children’s Books (Berkeley, Calif.), bookseller Clare Doornbos said sales were up 14% over last December. Although a predictable top seller was How Does Santa Go Down the Chimney? by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen, boosted by Mr. Mopps’ first-ever offsite event with the duo on December 9, “our biggest seller by a mile was a book from 2020,” Little Witch Hazel by Phoebe Wahl, Doornbos said. She credited the “deep backlist” at Mr. Mopps’ and said “the staff were handselling it like crazy. But I also felt like I didn’t see any new illustrated chapter book read-alouds for ages 4–7 that had that classic feel, so Little Witch Hazel jumped into that gap.”

Peter Brown’s Wild Robot trilogy also ratcheted off the shelves at Mr. Mopps’. “Normally, by the time we see the third book in a series, sales have slowed down,” Doornbos said. “But we sold a lot of The Wild Robot Protects (Book 3) and found that it brought the other two books with it.”

Another Berkeley bookstore, Pegasus Fine Books, listed Brown’s series as a middle-grade must-have this season too. Top kids’ performers for Pegasus included Anne Nesbet’s V Is for Victorine, Katherine Applegate’s The One and Only Ruby, Kelly Yang’s fifth Front Desk book, Top Story, and Stuart Gibbs’s eleventh Spy School series title, Spy School Goes North.

Danielson, of Eagle Harbor Book Co., named Jeff Kinney's latest Wimpy Kid book, No Brainer; Dav Pilkey's Cat Kid Comic Club: Influencers; and Christopher Paolini's Murtagh.

Rediscovered Bookshop in Boise, Idaho, did well with Kate DiCamillo’s The Puppets of Spelhorst and Seattle authors Ben Clanton and Andy Chou Musser’s fluffy cloud picture book, Ploof, said children’s book buyer Rebecca Crosswhite. The shop also took the opportunity to sell Boise author Mat Heagerty’s 2022 Lumberjackula, a middle grade graphic novel about a half-lumberjack, half-vampire hero. Like Rediscovered Bookshop, many West Coast shops reported hosting local authors to finish 2023 on a festive note.

This article has been updated to include additional store reports.